Howdy Chowk. I wrote this piece in response to the piece "Tears in a Bucket" by Padash. I'm not sure what the policy on printing contributions is, so I am going to post it here and in my ilog

Teeth and Tears


Ten dancers glide
across a mirror floor.
They have thin gilt plaques on Egyptian bodies,
fingertips reddened, blue lids painted,
bend yellow knees…
hands above knives, teeth above roses…
Ten anemic angels made of hollows,
melancholy embalms them.

Ballad of the Ten Casino Dancers
Ceceilia Meireles



When he grabbed you hands and pushed you to the floor you had been tightly holding one hand over your wrist. It was snowing outside, so you remember, the waves of horns and engines, coldly hushed. Strings of lights, crystallized fireflies were draped from the trees and echoed the street lamps, the silent moonlight. If you followed each the trail of each small white electric bulb, you might find your back to your mother’s house, you might outrun his slapping hands, his vodka’ed slobbery mouth licking away the heavy makeup you had painted on yourself.

Your friends have long gone, the self you were only hours ago has gone. You see her swaying to a ballad from your country; absently and slowly unbuttoning her shirt as she untangled the song as if it were a skein of wool. She frowns slightly as strips away the frenzied beat and hysterical synthesizers, heartbeat of an unforgiving city. She closes her eyes when she hears the field and when she finds the clouds drifting overhead, water pooling in the street behind her house, she lifts her arms as she did when she was a child in the first rain. She’s forgotten the din at her feet, the smoking men and women, their insistent eyes. As if they sense her indifference, they strain forward, laughing and gesticulating loudly in the effort of dragging back to them, to that room.

He’s jabbing at your breasts now, a starving infant feeding at an 18 year old mother.

Your right hand finds your left wrist, encircles the watch your mother gave you. You begin conjugating the verbs you learned in school ana adros, tadros, ana sharabati, ana habeti. You play the grammar game that made your little brother laugh ana adros chai, ana sharabati sher, ana habeti bilaldi. You try and remember the fragile web of his eyelids as he fell asleep against you as the man thrusting against you moans inconsolably. He drags your left hand towards his penis.


Imagine the road under the slide of your slippers, sweet juice of warm tomatoes, the slope of his shoulders, the wrinked skin at her wrist, the bluebird who insisted on breadcrumbs, the sukuun, mint and parsley laid out to dry, your hands oiling your brother’s hair, the rows of scrudded glasses, looking over your shoulder, the grain of your desk rippling like calligraphy under your fingertips, his first letter to you, the sea stretching out again and again and again.


I thought of you.